Police arrest wife in husband's killing

Published 8:00 pm, Monday, July 5, 2004

Girlene
Dasilva Soares
was arrested after she arrived at police headquarters four hours later.

Soares, a week shy of her 26th birthday, was being held on $1 million bail pending an appearance in Danbury Superior Court this morning.

Police said her husband was killed by what appeared to be a single stab wound to the stomach. Detective Capt.
Mitchell Weston
said investigators recovered the "kitchen-type knife'' believed to have been the murder weapon.

Patrol officers found Oliveira in the bedroom of the second-floor apartment at 13 Keeler St above a vacuum cleaner store. Emergency medical personnel who also responded to the call failed to detect a pulse and pronounced him dead.

Investigators were told Oliveira had been stabbed by his wife, Weston said.

Police are investigating reports the couple was arguing prior to the stabbing. But Weston refused to say whether anyone else was in the apartment when Oliveira was killed or who placed the 911 call.

He also declined to say whether police had responded to prior calls from the address.

Shortly before 7 a.m., she was dropped off at police headquarters by an individual who investigators refused to identify.

Police said both Soares and Oliveira came to the United States from Brazil, and they were still trying to determine their immigration status. It was also unknown whether the couple had any children, either in the U.S. or in Brazil, Weston said.

A clerk at a Main Street convenience store called the murder scary and said it was the talk of the neighborhood.

Groups of residents on the street, which contains a mix of apartments and businesses and is located less than two blocks from the police station, sat on their stoops watching investigators come and go from the apartment. None claimed to know the couple.

Oliveira's body was taken to the state medical examiner's office in Farmington for an autopsy.

The stabbing is the third murder in the city this year and the first in which police have made an arrest.

Authorities still have not apprehended the men who shot
Samuel Escobar
during a botched robbery Jan. 31 at the Division Street brothel where the 26-year-old Guatemalan worked as a doorman, nor have they charged anyone in the murder of 41-year-old Zef Vulevic, the Main Street restaurateur, who was last seen April 5 and whose dismembered body was discovered April 24 in Bedford, N.Y.